User:Amire80/analogy

Copied from a Quora answer I wrote once.

Question: What is the best analogy for Wikipedia?

Answer:

The biggest library in the world.

Like the library to which you went when you were a schoolchild, but instead of one or two rooms, it has thousand of rooms and more than 40 million books.

You don't ever have to pay to enter and read, but once a year somebody will politely ask you for a donation at the entrance. It's OK to refuse.

You don't need a library card. If you want, you can put on a name tag, but you don't have to write your real name.

On the walls there are no plaques with the names of people who donated to build the library except a really tiny one that says "Wikimedia Foundation". There are no vending machines for soft drinks or sandwiches either, but you can bring your own food.

You can read any book without limitation. You can also make a copy of any book and take it home. You can make more copies of the books and give them to your friends. If there is some part of any book that you don't like, you can change it. (See Definition of Free Cultural Works.)

The books are about any imaginable topic: all countries, cities and villages, people from all countries and all times, physics, medicine, history, music, art, religion, sex, psychology, business.

The books are written in almost 300 different languages. The are more books in English than in any other single language, but when you count all the books, most of them are not in English. There are quite a lot of books in German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, French and Polish, and you can also find books in Tamil, Indonesian, Swahili, and some languages of which you possibly never heard, like Sakha or Yoruba.

Most books have a lot of photos and illustrations.

As you read through the books you start noticing that some of them have stickers that say that they have "issues". For example, "insufficient references", "possibly non-notable subject", "sounds like an advertisement". You can still read them, however.

Occasionally you also notice that some books have torn pages or nonsense written here and there, but if you check the same book again after a few minutes it will somehow become clean again.

After some time you notice that something that you thought you would find there is missing. For example, information about a movie that you liked, a recent discovery in your professional field, or a park in your neighborhood. You ask the librarian how could it be, and the librarian suggests you to just write it yourself. At first you are surprised that they just let you write, but the librarian insists that it's really possible and tells you: "Be bold and just try it". You get a desk, a pen and some paper, and you write it. You quickly realize that there are some curious rules that you need to follow when you are writing. For example, you should refer to books from other libraries to help people verify what you wrote, but you cannot copy them word-for-word unless you have a specific permission. But with a bit of patience it's doable.

When you are finished, the librarian immediately puts your book on the shelf, no questions asked, even if you didn't follow the rules. There is no chief librarian who checks it. Other people can read it right away. After you put in on the shelf, you can also add to it. You can even change books that were written by other people and other people can change yours.

Occasionally people will come to you and tell you that something that you wrote is not good enough. For example, you made too many spelling mistakes, or you didn't add references to other books, or you just copied your book from some other without permission, or you expressed your own opinions too strongly instead of being neutral. Sometimes they will just improve it themselves, sometimes they will put a warning sticker on it, and sometimes they will delete what you wrote and ask you to rewrite it.

Then you notice that there are some side rooms where a lot of other people who also write books like you just did are talking to each other about how to make the library building better, how to spell Burmese names in English correctly, whether to call Kosovo an independent country or a region of Serbia, how to categorize books, in which color to design them. You can join their discussion without even introducing yourself, though some of them may suggest you wear your name tag for convenience. Occasionally people complain loudly that something good that they wrote was deleted; if they become too loud they are requested not to write anymore, but they still can read.

You also notice that there are some quiet, but energetic people running around the shelves and fixing little things in all the books. Correcting spelling, tearing out empty pages, moving them from shelf to shelf, adding stickers to books that have issues.

It takes you some time to learn all these things, and then when you tell people about this they have hard time understanding it. "What? Nobody checks what you wrote? And nobody pays you? How does it even work?"

And then you smile and say: "Be bold and just try it".